Please let me inform you about the major disaster that hangs over the scientific community in France. As you know France remains one of the best countries in the world for its research in the sciences. Unfortunately this situation is about to change. Despite official statements claiming that research is a national priority, the French Government plans to drastically shrink the public research sector, by financially asphyxiating public research institutions. Moreover, decreased funding is also associated with a severe reduction in the number of public positions for young researchers, which coincides with a massive wave of retirement among senior French researchers. At the same time Government projects to divert the funds to favor Applied Research, thus undermining Fundamental Research. Obviously the consequences of such a decision will be devastating for Science at large.

To protest against this dismantling of French Research, an initiative called "Sauvons la Recherche" (Save Research) has been launched. This movement involves lab directors, members of Public Scientific or Technical Institutions, like CNRS or INSERM, and university professors and research assistants. In an open letter to the Government from January 7, 2004 (already supported by more than 200000 researchers and non researchers signatures !), petitioning directors of research units and teams threaten to collectively resign all administrative duties if Government do not pay research agencies the millions of euros it owes them, to boost recruitment of young scientists and to launch a national debate on science.

Due to this pressure, the Government has recently decided to pay back the debt it already owed from 2002 to the scientist community. However this measure cannot be considered as a real investment in Research ! In this context, we think that positive evaluations of the French contribution to Research from our foreign colleagues would be of great importance. We would thus be grateful if you could express your appreciation of the quality of the French Science and your concern about this planned destruction of our research capacity on our website :